


Voices in My Head

by dancingswanprincess



Category: Be More Chill - Iconis/Tracz
Genre: Anxiety, Gen, i accidentally hurt her, mention of hallucinations, my poor daughter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-16
Updated: 2017-09-16
Packaged: 2018-12-30 14:52:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12111123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dancingswanprincess/pseuds/dancingswanprincess
Summary: Christine still deals with the after effects of getting the SQUIP.





	Voices in My Head

There are good days and bad days for Christine. 

On the good days, she can almost convince even herself that the whole ordeal in junior year was just a bad dream – that too many years in theater had given her an overactive imagination and that there wasn’t a dead, empty supercomputer embedded somewhere in the back of her brain. 

On the bad days, though….whoo, boy. On the bad days, she couldn’t even tell who she was. She questioned if her S.Q.U.I.P. was really deactivated, if _any_ of this was real. In senior year, Christine did a lot of research on the brain, and found out that there are no pain receptors in the actual brain tissue. Logically, Christine knew she couldn’t feel her brain, but panic didn’t always follow reason. Too many nights, she’d wake up from a nightmare with the echo of Hilary Clinton’s voice in her ear, feeling a cold spot inside her head. Sometimes, she’d even rip and tear at her hair trying to get the S.Q.U.I.P out – get it out, _out, **out.**_

College was especially bad for her. On her bad days in senior year, she always knew that she could text Jeremy, and he’d drop class and come to her house to try to snap her out of it. But in college, they’d split into different time zones. Christine had gotten into Tisch Drama School in NYU, Jeremy was going somewhere in California for something to do with video game development – he was talking about virtual reality or something when they’d last spoken. He couldn’t just drop his life anymore to come help her. Christine hadn’t thought someone could feel alone in a city as big as New York; that’s even what she told Jeremy when she left. 

On her bad days, Christine was reminded of how wrong she was. 

If it was this bad for her, she couldn’t even imagine how bad it was for someone who’d had it for longer, like Jeremy. That’s was another reason she didn't text him with this kind of stuff anymore – she’d only had the S.Q.U.I.P for hours, while Jeremy had it for _months._ She knew that he sometimes thought he could still see his S.Q.U.I.P. out of the corner of his eye or just outside a doorway, waiting. How could Christine complain to him about nightmares when he might be hallucinating or something? No, no, she couldn’t ask him to give up time to put her back together when he was probably in pieces himself. She’d found ways to deal with it herself – sometimes she took walks, sometimes she wrote it out in a journal. It really depended on the day. 

On this particular bad day, she gritted her teeth and clutched the pillow on her dorm bed, something almost definitely real. When Christine’s heart started pounding with panic, she took a deep breath – just like when she got nervous backstage before a performance. It always happened. The one time it didn’t was the play in Junior year and that was only because she’d had her S.Q.U.I.P controlling it somehow for her. God, how easy that was, how nice it felt to have everything be so easy. Christine blinked away tears and started the mantra that the therapist had taught her. _I am strong and in control, I am strong and in control, I am strong in control._

Christine had survived bad days before. She would survive this one too. 


End file.
